


Excur

by intodusk



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Canon Compliant (until it isn't), Gen, Multi, Post-GM, Post-Worm, Pre-Ward, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-14
Updated: 2018-11-04
Packaged: 2019-07-12 04:18:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15987470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intodusk/pseuds/intodusk
Summary: Trip’s power has taken her all over the world and even beyond it, but when her team gets the opportunity to integrate into one of the most infamous villain teams from Bet, it may take her to places she never thought she'd go - for better or worse.





	1. Pack 1.1

“Swear to Christ, Mask, if- fuck!” I said, flinching back to cover as a peal of rifle fire echoed through the street. “If you say _anything_ like, ‘I told you so,’ even _once_ , I’ll strand you on Earth Zayin.”

I turned back to find him glaring at me, eyes low-lidded behind his ornate ball mask. For the time being, he cut an imposing figure, all tall, trim and groomed in his unwrinkled tux, not a single slicked-back hair out of place. Even hunkered down as we were right now, backs up against the rusting corpse of a sedan, he somehow maintained the air of a prince, and anyone else might’ve been intimidated.

I rolled my eyes, knowing he couldn’t see them behind my aviator goggles. He could probably tell anyways. “Sorry. Swear to Christ, _Masquerade._ How was I supposed to know there’d be scavengers in a nowhere town like this anyways?”

He smirked when I emphasized his cape name with jazz hands. His nod of thanks was as insincere as my show of respect, but his preening was genuine. “Given the track record of our other visits to Bet, I’m surprised that you’re surprised.”

I tried to peek again, poking my head out a half foot to the right this time. Another shot dented the metal right by my ear before I could see anything new and I dropped back down, swearing. “Yeah, well, this time it doesn’t make sense! We’re half as far as you can get from any portal, the natural resources ‘round here amount to _jack_ and  _shit,_ and the only things worth looting are the guns they're shooting us with. You can get guns anywhere. No way folks’re already so desperate they need to go to Colorado for that.”

“Maybe they’re here for the scenery.” When I snorted, he said, “No, really! What better place to retire to after the world ends than some quiet, cozy mountain town? A crisp breeze, an intimate view of Pike’s Peak, no one to bother you-”

“‘Cept us.”

“-except us, right. All in all, prime settling down material, if not for us meddling kids. I might even suggest checking the gift shops for a souvenir.”

He gestured to my jacket. It was more patch than denim, each faded iron-on marked with the name and sometimes symbol of a place worth going, or at least considered such enough to have a patch. I knew from experience which actually were and which weren’t, or rather which had been and hadn’t been. Even as one of the most intact places I’d seen on Bet so far, this one ranked in the latter category.

“I’ll take a second opinion on that,” I said. A stray bullet pierced one of the tires on the other side of the car, making the whole thing tilt. “What say we go grab Polar, see what he thinks?”

He nodded. “Have something in mind?”

“Maybe. Follow my lead.” Still crouched, I turned around, raising my hands over my head nice and slow. “Hey, assholes,” I shouted, “stop shooting already! We don’t want your guns!”

For a moment, there was silence. Then a gruff voice shouted back, “Yeah, and I’m fuckin’ Legend!”

I chanced a show of faith, rising inch by inch from cover. There was a familiar flash of warmth at my side, and the bits of ash that followed tickled my nose and almost made me sneeze before they dissipated into thin air. “I mean it! We don’t want guns and we don’t want trouble! We just need to grab a couple things you won’t miss and we’ll be on our way!”

Next to me, a shorter girl in a black midi dress mirrored my pose, her wavy auburn bob and feathered mask framing an innocent smile. Supposedly, this mask was supposed to evoke a crow and the other a raven, but I'd never been able to see a meaningful difference between the two. “It's true,” Masquerade yelled, her voice a couple octaves higher than before. “We'll be in and out before you know it!”

I took the momentary ceasefire as an opportunity to straighten out, getting a better view of the police station across the street. Despite the hints of disrepair, it had the same happy plainness as the rest of the town, the kind all true North American tourist traps shared. Gentle red roof over manilla walls, inoffensive architecture, lots of wide, simple windows. It would've been inviting if it wasn’t so boring, or if the winter overcast wasn't dulling its colors, or if three of the windows hadn’t been cleared out and turned into vantage points. With the blinds half-closed, I couldn't gleam more about our attackers than their vague silhouettes, but if I unfocused my eyes I could get a good sense of the wall behind them, which was all I really needed.

After a quiet I assumed was filled with whispered debate on their end, the same voice replied, “Don't think so. Hightail it or- or eat lead!”

“Oh, good,” Masquerade said under her breath, “this won't be too boring, then.” She tilted her head at me and crooked an arm. “Shall we away, Miss Trip?”

I looped mine through hers. “Let's, Miss Mask.”

She leveled another glare at me, much less intimidating in this form, but once I tipped us backwards on our heels, she abandoned it in order to steel herself. I ignored her and shoved my other hand into the pocket of my jacket.

In one moment, we were falling towards the pavement like dominoes.

In the next, we were stumbling away from a stretch of brick-and-mortar wall, upright and doing our best to counteract our momentum. I had an easier time of it; my power didn’t make me an acrobat or anything, but it did smooth things over in the balance department. It also eliminated my capacity for motion sickness, which I’ve been assured was a boon from on high. Given how often my ‘trips’ forced an abrupt shift in gravity, I didn’t doubt it.

Masquerade wasn’t as lucky. She staggered over to one of the metal chairs on the café patio we’d arrived at, flopping against it like a blanket tossed onto the back of a sofa. She waved off the look of concern I wasn’t giving her. “Oh, I’m fine! I’m fine. One second.”

I turned to Polar, who was leaning his stocky frame against the edge of a table, the kind that had to be weighted at the bottom to keep the attached umbrella from catching the wind and riding it. He had his arms crossed over his chest, managing to make the position look comfortable despite his bandolier being in the way. He was probably a good deal warmer than I was, given the head-to-toe black body armor. His weighted gloves, each marked on the back with a bold red N and a blue S for the left and right respectively, had to be trapping heat better than my own beaten leather ones. Though his balaclava only revealed his flat hazel eyes, I’d worked with him long enough to know the rest of his expression underneath reflected the same sedate calm.

“No surprises here,” he said. He tipped his head in the general direction of the police station, which was a few blocks away now. “The gunshots?”

I’d already known things had been quiet where I’d left him to play lookout. We had a system for it: two ball bearings, each given opposite ‘charges’ from his power, pinched the fabric of my jacket’s sleeve between them, right by my inner wrist. If he’d needed to signal Masquerade and me, or if he’d been forced to move outside the considerable range of his power, they would have lost the charges that attracted them to each other and fallen from my sleeve.

I dragged the bearings off my sleeve and handed the now conjoined pair back to him. “Scavengers in the station, three or four. Not the friendly type. No capes, far as we could tell, so the usual should do fine.”

He nodded. The bearings went back into one of the hip pouches he kept them in. He then retrieved a flashbang from his bandolier and handed it to me.

I held it tight in one hand and faced the wall again, backing up a good few yards. My other hand ran through my short hair, disturbing its styled muss as I mapped out the next few steps. Polar and Masquerade both rose while I prepared myself, coming to stand on either side of me, each at the ready. I thumbed the pin of the grenade.

Without a word, I broke into a dead sprint and leapt at the wall.

A few things happened in quick succession. I tripped through the bricks and emerged from the wall I’d seen inside the police station, still in the air from my jump. I had a fraction of a second to get a sense of the space and gauge the positions of the men inside before lobbing the flashbang, sans pin, towards the portion of the room least cluttered by desks. The one woman who wasn’t watching the windows turned and saw me then, but I was already on my way out, letting momentum and gravity tilt me forward and carry me to the ground. When I reached the tile I tripped again, shooting like a cannonball back into the patio area. Polar caught me before I could skid the soles off my running shoes and set me on my feet.

Taking up my position between the two again, I said, “Four, three by windows, one off to the right of the others. Didn’t see them wearing anything tough, but I’ll eat my gloves if they’re not rocking vests under their coats.” With an arm around Masquerade’s slim waist and another on Polar’s back, I barked a steady, “Three! Two! One! _GO!_ ” We rushed forward in long-practiced synchronization, each mindful not to outpace the others, and I brought us through the wall.

Our exit point was a different wall in the station, left of the windows, next to the biggest desk congregation as well as the first gunman. His position meant he’d shrug off the disorienting blast first, and he might have gotten to, were it not for Polar. He gripped the guy’s ratty jacket and tore it open, sending buttons flying and revealing the tactical vest marked “POLICE” underneath. He tapped the vest with his left hand, no doubt giving it a charge, and gave the glove on his right hand the opposite charge. As a result, his open palm, where the bulk of the glove’s weights were, slammed into the man’s chest with brutal, instantaneous force. He must have released one or both charges on impact because, instead of staying stuck to Polar’s hand, the man fell back onto the ground, winded and stunned.

He landed at the boots of the next panicked scavenger, alerting him to our presence. This one was squinting some and had a bit of tilt in his step as he turned to face us, but he was coherent enough to get a couple lucky shots in, if given the chance.

Masquerade did not give him that chance. She shifted, burning away her Crow form in a burst of heat and ash and emerging from it as a toned, maskless runner in 80’s-style green track shorts and tube socks. She sprinted up to him, reared an arm, then shifted again, becoming a huge, burly bouncer worthy of the haymaker he threw to the man’s temple. That staggered him without straight-up dropping him, but the distinction became moot when Masquerade grabbed him by the back of his coat, pulled him off his feet, swung him like a battering ram and flung him into the next poor sap, knocking both into a shelving unit in the far corner.

“STEEE-RIKE!” Masquerade yelled, giving an emphatic fist-pump.

Unfortunately, his showboating was loud enough to draw the attention of the last scavenger still standing, the one who’d noticed me first. She’d also been closest to the blast, so she was significantly off-balance, but she found it in her to draw a pistol and raise it in Masquerade’s general direction.

Fortunately, I was already in motion, having hopped off the seat of an office chair in order to get higher off the ground. That gave gravity the distance it needed to get me falling faster than my power’s threshold required and I tripped from floor to wall, awkwardly drop-kicking her in the ribs. She yelped in surprise and lost her grip on her pistol, and the two of us fell to the tile as it clattered a few feet away. I recovered first and kicked it further, then crouched over her prone form to check for any other weapons while she writhed and groaned in pain. I didn’t find any, but what I did find sent a fresh ripple of tension up my spine.

I swore under my breath. “Guys, we just earned ourselves a time limit.” I unclipped a medallion from the carabiner on the belt loop of her jeans and held it up for my teammates to see. It was a crude thing, cast in recycled aluminum, hung from a loop of frayed leather, meant to represent the north star framed by a compass.

Masquerade looked up from the downed man whose hands he was ziptying and frowned. “Ah, hell,” he said, his voice a scratchy, slurred rumble in this form. “These knuckleheads just hadda be Reclaimers, huh?” He accepted another ziptie from Polar and knelt by the woman I was keeping down. “Anyone wanna guess which settlement they’s from?”

Polar, who was pinning the restrained to the floor by giving their vests and the tile opposite charges, piped up. “They're a scouting party, not a scavenging detail.” He nodded his head towards an open bag of measuring instruments on one of the desks, the sort that had rods you stuck in the ground or water or what have you and gave a number value to how awful things had gotten. They were necessities for the groups still trying to resettle on Bet; chemical runoff from inert factories and processing plants had made many of the remaining cities and towns incapable of sustaining life.

In retrospect, it made sense that this place was so thoroughly deserted. There were few marks of true industry in the town itself, but those further down the slope had had breweries, meat-packing plants and the like, and most places past that had put large amounts of money into manufacturing. Thus, while the immediate area was itself livable, the only population centers accessible through the mountains were not, meaning there was no good way to bring in what would be needed to kick-start a self-sustaining township, nor good reason to. Of course, the Reclaimers, who had their own means of supply and nebulous ideological motivations, would see only opportunity.

“So we have no way of knowing which cape is in charge of them until they come to check out the gunshots and find us standing over their wiped normals. Great.” I groaned, echoing the woman under me. “At least we know they're not a mover, if they're not here yet.”

Masquerade finished securing the tie and rose, shifting into Raven form. “Who knows? Perhaps this time they'll be willing to hear us out.”

I blew a raspberry at him. He smiled.

Polar came over and touched the woman's vest through a small tear in the back of her coat and she jerked, her torso dropping flush against the floor with a pained, pitiful whimper. “We shouldn't waste time,” he said, heading into a connecting hallway, checking out rooms as he passed them.

I stood and followed, and Masquerade fell into stride beside me. “Polar Bear’s right. Let's get what we came for.”

“Mm.” He peeked behind us a moment, then said, a pinch quieter, “Wouldn't want to keep the boss waiting,” Masquerade said.

I scoffed, but matched his tone. “Like she would care, long as we get the file. We could be gone for a week and she wouldn't mind.”

“Speak for yourself. _My_ winning personality would be sorely missed if I were gone for even an day.”

I gave him a light smack upside the head.

“Rude,” he said, still smiling.

Polar paused by an open door near the end of the L-shaped hallway before nodding and entering. I felt cramped just looking in; it seemed to have more file cabinets than open floor space, stacked almost to the low ceiling. The lack of both windows and power for the fluorescents meant it was lit only by what it borrowed from the small windows in the hall. To remedy this, Polar pulled a couple small flashlights from one of his vest’s many pouches and handed one to Masquerade. He clicked his own on, pulled a drawer open, and started rifling through files. Masquerade took a moment to shift into some cartoonish impression of a cat burglar, complete with skullcap and black-and-white striped shirt, before starting on a different cabinet, flashlight held in her mouth.

I stayed where I was outside the doorway, arms folded, loosely equidistant from either wall so I could take a clean fall at most angles if I needed to. There was no way of telling how far away this group’s shepherding parahuman was or how long it’d take them to get back, but they couldn’t have been too far, and as getaway driver and default shotcaller both I was more effective standing at the ready than joining the search. Plus, any excuse to slack off was a-ok in my book, and a justified one best of all.

The minutes passed like syrup through a strainer. I tapped my foot. I rolled my neck. I ground my teeth. None of it helped much. Having to stand still so long was hard enough on its own, and doing so while playing watchdog for a cape with unknown powers had me downright agitated.

Despite my faith in our boss’ information, I mouthed a quick half-serious prayer that the file we were looking for was actually here - there were few things that irked me more than finding out I’d gone dancing through minefields for nothing. She hadn’t steered us wrong yet, but this all felt like a serious longshot. There were, according to her source, a lot of high likelihoods involved, a handful of near-certainties, but when it came down to it, we didn’t have absolutes on anything: we couldn’t be sure the incident in question had been reported, or if it had happened in this specific town, or if it’d even happened in the first place. If all of the above _were_ true, then by the regulations put in place after the first Simurgh attack there should be multiple paper copies of the report, but even then that didn’t mean they hadn’t been disappeared after the fact. I’d lived in the shadow of the Elite long enough to know that.

“Mm?” Masquerade hummed around her flashlight, turning towards the both of us as she scoured the file in her hands. “Mm! Mmm-hm!” She relocated the light to her free hand and grinned. “Well ‘ere’s a spot of luck! Overdue, consid’ring the excitement, but-”

I interrupted. “That fit the details?”

She swayed the light around like a jaunty conductor as she listed them off. “Summer twenny-eleven, body goes missing from th’ local morgue, nothing broke, nothing else gone ‘cept a keyboard an’ half the coffee machine’s parts, an’ the one guy working that night writes a note ‘bout some arse-naked Case 53 did it before he disappears too- sounds all there t’me.”

I sighed my relief. “Finally. Alright, let’s bounce before that cape gets back.”

I’d only just reached the room’s threshold when a layer of pale, glassy red spread out in front of me, filling the doorway. Without room enough to react I bumped into it face-first, briefly stunned and unbalanced. On instinct I leaned into the momentum of my rebound, meaning to fall backwards to the floor, but just before achieving horizontality I was intercepted, slamming back-first into something much more solid and much less trip-through-able than I’d hoped for.

My yelp of surprise and pain only just escaped my throat before the new surface vanished out from under me, and another few inches’ fall found me properly grounded, except now I didn’t have the speed I needed to trip. Another plane of red smeared into existence inches above me in a diagonal strip a foot wider than my shoulders, attached on one end to the wall by the door’s left and on the other end to the opposite wall. Two thinner vertical strips on either side of my middle connected floor to ceiling, not quite intersecting the first, and a smile crept across my face.

I recognized those forcefields.

My head lolled towards the bend in the hall in time to see a pair of combat boots I _didn’t_ recognize approach with stamping stride. The snow-camouflaged fatigues tucked into them were also unfamiliar, as was the long, open grey utility coat that covered the ensemble. All that was a far sight from the firetruck-red bodysuit with white accents I’d been expecting. The domino mask and shield were the only elements of the old getup left, though the shield, once sturdy tinkertech designed to look like a stop sign, seemed to have been replaced with an actual stop sign, ripped from post and bound to forearm, dented and scratched in places. There was even an offensive weapon to compliment it now - a metal bat gripped tight in the other hand, even more dented, but still a much-needed addition.

Despite all the changes, I knew the face atop it all too well to doubt: dark skin, close-cut hair, ever-furrowed brow, and a handsome boyishness that, apparently, not even the apocalypse could harden. The scowl twisting his lips did its damndest to pick up the slack, but it only accentuated his anodyne tenor by contrast. It deepened when I gave him a shrill wolf-whistle, doubling the effect.

“London, Kelly? Eat your fucking hearts out,” I said, cheeks split despite my predicament. “Not even two years after the world ends and here you are, rocking some _fresh_ end-of-the-world chic like there’s still runways to walk. Mask, are you seeing this?”

From behind the translucent pane blocking off the file room, Masquerade made a frame with her fingers and held it in front of her face, shifting angles like a professional photographer, tongue poking out the corner of her mouth. She gave him an approving nod and kissed her fingers like an Italian chef. I couldn’t see where Polar was.

“Anyways, hey! Blockade! You’re alive! Too! Me too. Too.” I shook my head. “And you’re a Reclaimer now! That’s great stuff, really. Are you in it for all the fun rules and responsibility, or are you more one of the weird religious types? I feel like you could go either way.”

Blockade scowled down at me, though the red tint and slight refraction through his forcefield made it look funny. Funnier. “I should have guessed it was you, Trip.” he bit out. “In retrospect, six seasons without getting screwed over by your nonsense was too much to expect.”

“Whoa there, boy scout! That was almost an actual swear!” He tried to cut in but I held up my hands in appeasement. “Sorry, sorry. _Eagle_ scout. But we’re not here to do any screwing. Your normals just got eager, played a little rough, so we played too. We just needed a couple pieces of paper, which we’ve got, and we’re out of here. Cross my heart.”

He looked over to Masquerade, who was holding up the file with one hand and tracing an ‘x’ over her shirt’s stripes. She could clearly hear me, so she knew his forcefields didn’t block sound, but she seemed content with the opportunity to play mime anyways.

He looked back at me. “Do you think I’m still the same gullible kid I was in San Francisco? That I’m still some bright-eyed Ward you can mess with whenever you feel like it?”

Of course I did.

“Well, you’re- I’m not! I know you know what you’re doing. You _know_ you just made me fail my first trial, and that there’s nothing I can do about it.”

I cocked a brow. “What, ‘cause the other scouts got some bruises and bumps?”

“Because they got taken down by hostiles under my watch!” His arms rose with his frustration. “And now I’m going to get rejected for a leadership position and go back to the bottom of the candidates list! It took me long enough to get to this the first time, and it’ll take even longer to get there again, and I’ll still have this stain on my performance record, forever, and it’s _all. Because. Of you._ ” He ground the words out through his teeth.

“Well, you got here on-”

In an unprecedented move on his part, he interrupted me. “But I do get one thing out of this. I got _you._ ” He loomed over me, satisfaction dancing in his dark eyes. “After years of making me look like a chump and getting away every time, I’ve finally, actually caught you. I’m willing to bet you’ve made a lot of trouble for a lot of people lately.” I had. “I’m also willing to bet the Wardens want you somewhere you can’t blink out of.” Not badly. “So what’s going to happen is, I’m going to contact some old friends, they’ll come pick you and _your_ new friend up, and justice, however delayed, will be _served._ ”

“Listen,” I said, making a deliberate effort not to peek towards the records room, “That sounds, like, super fun and all, and I’d love to hang with you and your old scout leaders sometime, but it’s almost five and Mom wants me home by dinner, so…”

“Oh yeah?” He gave what I think he thought was a smug smirk. “And just how are you slipping away from this one?”

I showed his sorry excuse for a smirk how it was done. “Like this.”

A silent moment passed and neither of us dropped our smirks or eye contact. I almost started to worry until a resounding thump shook the walls. Blockade snapped his head toward the sound like a bloodhound, and I tensed beneath my widening grin, ready to move.

Nothing happened.

A low, muffled sigh came from somewhere in the shadows of the room. Blockade slowly looked back at me, straining to keep his un-smirk from slipping into an uncertain, stress-tightened grimace (not that it’d had far to go to begin with). I gave him a conceding shrug and rolled a hand as best I could while pinned, making a ‘wait for it’ gesture.

A horrible, weighty clang came next, metal shrieking and groaning against metal in a visceral cacophony, making us both cringe and cover our ears. A breath’s reprieve, and then the walls thundered and shook again. Through the open door to the room adjacent to the file room, I saw a clumpy hunk of shiny grey burst through the wall, trailing folders and papers and bits of drywall and making firewood of the conference table it crashed into. It took my brain a second to make sense of the jagged intruder - it was a pair of file cabinets, crumpled and mashed together like two empty soda cans in love.

Polar stepped through the hole in the wall, moving with the sort of battlefield calm that can’t be faked. He rounded on Blockade, pulled a handful of ball bearings from a hip pouch and, with all the efficiency of a wild west duelist and none of the panache, splayed his hand palm-forward, gave his glove and the bearings the same charge, and sent them flying in Blockade’s direction like hip-fired buckshot.

Blockade reacted just fast enough to count. A foot-wide forcefield from floor to ceiling blocked most of the bearings without faltering and his raised shield deflected the two that went wide, earning a couple new dents. The field disappeared and reappeared, shifted to one side to block the next shot from Polar’s other hip. This time, though, one or two bearings got him in the bicep of his shield arm and he let out a pained, “ _Ah!!_ God, fu- _crap!_ Crap on _wheels! Cripes!_ ”

Despite myself, I winced with sympathy. I’d never been on the other end of Polar’s projectiles, but I’d seen the bruises they left on others, and while they didn’t move as fast as bullets their weight gave them some wicked punch. For all my teasing and his grumpiness, I wasn’t keen on hurting Blockade beyond a little hand-to-hand or (ha!) tripping him up. I’d poked fun at him and pissed him off when we were both new to the scene, sure, but more than anything I’d seen him as a great way to practice using my power. He got to try and catch one of San Fran’s only independent villains and I would have to find clever workarounds on the fly for a power that should’ve been a direct counter to mine. I learned how to keep people on their toes, and he...

Well, he learned how to fall, at least. That’s important.

Regardless, we weren’t getting out of here without someone getting a little hurt, and if it had to be someone, we’d make it him.

He used another forcefield to block the other doorway, but the pain in his arm must have been distracting him, because that surpassed his limit of five active barriers, and the one that I’d run into first made a simultaneous exit, dissipating into the air. An actual, factual knight in shining armor charged out from the file room into the hall, helm closed, suit silvery with elaborate, twining details around the borders of the pieces, bearing a kite shield and a sword. They rushed Blockade too fast for him to pull up a forcefield between them and brought their sword down on his stop sign with a clang and a rousing, “Ha-HA!” Blockade responded in kind with a high swing of his bat but Masquerade brought their own shield up to meet it.

While the two of them clashed, Masquerade pressuring Blockade further away from me with each move, Polar stepped through the hole between rooms and knelt by my side. His eyes darted to the others once or twice, probably to make sure Masquerade was still impeding Blockade’s line of sight on us, but otherwise he was looking at me, awaiting my word.

I gestured for him to draw closer before whispering his instructions.

He nodded, then got into position. He squatted over my legs, almost straddling the forcefield above me, and, leaning forward and through the gap between the two vertical ones keeping me from rolling to either side, locked his forearms with mine. They were tensed, like mine, but steady.

I tilted my head towards the fight and shouted, “Mask! H-n-R!”

Just as I gave the call, Masquerade shifted, their motions morphing from a knight's stoic obstinance into something new, graceful and feather-light to fit the ballet dancer she'd become. She flowed under Blockade’s swing like water, infiltrated his guard in two steps, shifted, and buried a bouncer-sized fist in his solar plexus.

The blow knocked him clean off his feet and put the first tangible distance between the two. His bat clattered on the ground next to him. In a commendable show of quick instincts, a forcefield appeared between them just as he was able to suck in a breath again, wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling and tilted a bit, like a clear red roof over his downed form.

At the same time, the field above me disappeared, and without hesitation Polar yanked me up, through the gap in the other two and to my feet. He followed through on the movement by pivoting so he and I were side by side, his arm over my shoulders and mine at his back, then pulled us both forward in a domino-fall through the file room doorway.

We tripped out of a wall just next to a cloud of dissipating ash. I reached out with my free arm to snag a slim waist from within as momentum carried us forward, then dragged my teammates down to the floor for one last trip. The last thing I heard before we reached the tile was a wheezing sound in the general shape of a curse, and I had just enough time to wish I could stick around to see if he'd actually swear once he could speak again.

The next moment, the three of us tumbled into the middle of what we called the Landing Room, whose floor was layered thick with gymnastics mats and foam mattresses and cushions and pillows. We rolled a good few feet before coming to a stop, tangled and smothered in a pile of disturbed pillows and each others’ limbs. By longstanding unspoken agreement, we allowed ourselves a minute of rest without worrying about detangling or talking, filling the space with heavy breathing and the occasional low moan of discomfort or nausea.

A thought occurred to me, and I ended up being the first to break the moment, lifting my head. “Uhh, you did bring the file, right?”

From somewhere within our conglomerate of bodies and cushions a slender hand protruded, clutching an unharmed manilla folder and waving it a little.

“Cool, cool.” My head flopped back into something soft and I drained my lingering nerves through a long exhale. “Cool.”

Θ

“ _He wants a very nice, deserted house…”_

The old, hunched troll of a man, looking more like a garden gnome gone mad than a real estate mogul, raised a bumpy finger with dramatic languor, directing his subordinate’s gaze. The next shot revealed the row of tall, ugly buildings he'd pointed out, each looking like they were about to topple to one side and take half the block with them.

“ _That house… opposite yours. Just offer him that one!”_

This time there was only a very brief shot between the dialogue cards. It was a tad distracting for it, the way a flickering bulb in a dark basement is; it illuminated the living room for a second, the black and white image reflected blurry on the hardwood floor, the vertical blinds that blocked the dizzying view of New Brockton given glow, the marbletop kitchen island visible on the peripheral level. Then it went dark again, and it was just us, the dialogue card’s gothic font, and the overbearing pipe organ chords this recording had been set to.

“ _Travel quickly, travel well, young friend, to the country of ghosts.”_

Val splayed her hands with unnecessary gravitas and mouthed the words like she was performing them in the silent characters’ stead, eyes glued to the screen and legs draped over mine. She'd not bothered to shift out of Crow form, instead opting to simply remove her mask and flats with her power and go right from Landing Room to couch. I couldn't say much myself, though, seeing as I'd only shed my goggles, gloves, jacket and shoes and plopped down right next to her still wearing my costume’s tank top and kevlar leggings. It felt like too much work to get up and change right now, so I didn't.

Lucas occupied his usual recliner, draped in loose sweats, crunching his way through a bag of those roasted corn kernel snacks he loved so much. It was a wonder he didn't lose any in the bushy, half-tamed thing he called a beard. As soon as he'd found out we were watching a silent film, he'd disappeared down the hall that led to our rooms, our boss’ room, the bathrooms and the study and come back wearing his bulky over-ear headphones. He was probably paying more attention to his music than the movie, but I couldn't blame him.

After too many minutes of not enough happening, I groaned. “ _Ugh,_  this is so boring. And so cheesy. And so fucking boringly cheesy.”

Val kicked one of my shins, ignored my “Hey!” of protest, and said, “If you're so eager to break our agreement, why'd you agree to it in the first place, hmm?”

I frowned. That ‘agreement’, that I'd stop whinging about everything Val picked if she'd stop shifting into approximations of the characters she liked most and saying their lines with them, was one of the only reasons we'd managed to keep watching movies together without strangling each other. I still felt like the terms were unfair, though. “Listen, I'm not whining, I'm just saying. You said this was a horror flick but we're like, ten minutes in and it's been all bland weirdos doing bland business and having bland marriage issues, except someone says something dumb and cryptic out of the blue sometimes. That's _it_.”

She sighed. “I swear, Shannon, I'll teach you some patience if I have to gag you and tie you to a chair.”

“Is that a threat or a promise?”

She didn't even dignify me with a glare. “This is as classic as classic horror gets! This film is the _grandfather_ of all other vampire films. It invented one of the most important shots in horror there is. You can't appreciate the derivatives properly unless you know where their roots were planted.”

I rolled my eyes. “Whatever. I'll stick it out, but I've still got next choice.”

The movie did start getting more interesting by the time the protagonist started causing a commotion in what I thought might have been a pub, but around then I began to feel an odd discomfort where my jaw met my neck. I tried to push the feeling aside, but it persisted, so I went to scratch at it. My fingers caught on a thin string of elastic and I hesitated. Following the string up the side of my head led me to a pointed paper shape in my hair, tilted a touch to one side.

“Hey Val, is-”

When I looked over, I found Val was now similarly adorned, perfect auburn locks topped with a cheap, colorful party hat. “Hmm? What's…” When she opened her mouth to reply, the party blower that'd appeared between her lips fell out, and she looked down at where it landed on her collarbone as her mind caught up with her eyes. “...eh?”

I turned to ask Lucas and saw that he had two party hats of his own, each strapped to the outside of his headphones where they covered his ears. He looked like an old-school TV robot and seemed as unperturbed as ever.

I blinked. “What the fu-”

“SURPRISE!! _”_

Between the shout, the lights switching on, and the party popper that blasted confetti into my face, I nearly jumped out of my skin. Our boss was suddenly standing right in front of us, posing under a banner that'd been edited in multicolor marker letters and extended with printer paper:

“ _Happy B̶i̶r̶t̶h̶d̶a̶y̶ You're Almost Undersiders!”_

With enthusiastic jazz hands and a toothy grin, Aisha scanned our reactions. Her grin faded and her hands fell to her side as she took in my exasperation, Val’s near-contemptuous disbelief, and Lucas’ disaffected stare.

“Well shit, don't strain yourselves getting excited or anything. Sheesh.”


	2. Pack 1.2

I pulled the party hat off my head and chucked it at Aisha.  
  
She jerked, feigning grievous gut wounds from its cardstock point. “Hey, whoa, careful where you throw that, you'll poke someone's eye out!”  
  
“That's the plan,” I said, accepting Val’s gift of her own hat. This time I nailed Aisha on the collarbone.  
  
“Ow! That one actually hurt, you- ack!” She tried to duck the party blower, but that just meant it hit her forehead instead. “Alright, that's it!”  
  
I blinked, wondering at the cheap party supplies sitting in the middle of the otherwise empty floor.  
  
Then Aisha was standing by the couch, leaning over my sprawled form, hands on hips, the ends of her cornrows dangling above me. “You know what this means, don't you?” She grinned. “‘If I cannot inspire love, I will cause  _fear_.’”  
  
I was staring at the ceiling. Why was I staring at the ceiling?  
  
“ _BOO!_ ”  
  
Val and I jumped when Aisha reappeared right in Lucas’ impassive face, hands spread by her face almost like one of those bizarre lizards with the skin collars.  
  
Lucas didn't flinch. He pulled one padded end of his headphones off his ear, party hat still attached, and set it to rest just behind the shell- his kind of courtesy.  
  
She pointed a finger at him. “Don't think I won't get you someday, tough guy. The bigger they are, the harder they, uh…”  
  
Gone, then back.  
  
“The bigger they are, the worse it is- ugh.”  
  
Again.  
  
“The  _braver_  they are,” she said, beaming with satisfaction, “the harder they  _piss themselves_  when I  _get them_.”  
  
“Two stars,” Val offered.  
  
“Four at the least, you philistines of fun,” she returned.  
  
“What is this actually about?” I interjected, nodding at the banner. “‘Cause I'm pretty sure we’ve been ‘almost Undersiders’ for the better part of a year already.”  
  
“No, you were  _almost_  ‘almost Undersiders,’ and now we're taking away the first almost. Lucky you!” At my glare she added, “Okay, look, Tattletale wants to meet you guys before making anything official. She'll have you do one, maybe two more little missions for her, and then you're set. She's gearing up for something that might go deep and says she wants to get a feel for how you do things before she decides whether to bring you in on it or not. Which, with her, probably just means she wants to poke and prod you with her power while you’re under pressure. Persistently.”  
  
Val shrugged. “That makes sense.”  
  
“So what’s this ‘something’?” I asked.  
  
“Dunno, but it starts with that file you guys nabbed. That all of it?” She gestured to the folder on the end table by Val, who affirmed and passed it to her. She thumbed through it, face scrunching up a bit as she parsed the pages’ formats.  
  
“If we got this for Tattletale, does that mean it counts towards our one or two missions for her?”  
  
Without looking up, she answered me, “Nope, one or two on top of this one. You lazy jerks aren’t getting off that easy. Now shush, I’m trying to read here.” She flipped to the last sheet and frowned. “Huh. Weird. Don’t think I’ve heard of a Case 53 Tinker before, if that’s what this turns out to be. I figured most of them had more tangible powers, to go with their changes or whatever. Wait, hold on.” Her head tilted in that exaggerated way capes who wore full-face masks did. “Was Trainwreck a Case 53? I can’t remember if he was just like that already or not.”  
  
I had no idea who she was talking about so I grunted as much. “There was a Ward in, like, Phoenix or something who I’m pretty sure had a secondary Tinker rating. Zolomos, I think. Maybe Zosimos. She would shove all sorts of stuff down her gullet, and this secondary stomach of hers broke them down and reconfigured them. Then she’d throw up the material it made, or the chemical or whatever, and use it in… Well, I don’t remember what, but yeah.”  
  
She shrugged one shoulder, closing the folder. “If she was figuring out unique uses for them, then that should count. Tattle can probably get us her file to make sure. Or she’ll just tell us she already knew there were C-53 tinkers and lord her Thinker-ness over us for a bit. Probably both.”  
  
Val hummed. “I take it she's prone to that sort of thing.”  
  
She laughed, wry, unbitter. “If she’s in a good mood.”  
  
That sounded right. I’d only run into her a scant few times before… before, and only in one specific kind of circumstance at that, but the way others talked about her gave me the sense she was one of those capes that reveled in their power, took pride in it, turned it from a weapon or tool into a way of life. I didn’t doubt it might be grating from the other end and I wasn’t fond of Thinkers on the whole, but I respected that kind of mindset.  
  
“Anyways,” Aisha said, clapping her hands in a chop, chop, “let’s get to it, yeah? Places to go, people to see, blond brats to pick up.”  
  
After shoving Val’s legs off mine, I hesitated, halfway from couch to standing. “I thought his assignment wasn’t over for, like, another couple hours.”  
  
“Well, now it’s over now. Grab your stuff already, we’re hitting up Tattle’s place right after.” She disappeared down the part of the hallway that led to our rooms, followed by an ambling Lucas.  
  
I sighed, rose to my feet, and promptly tipped forward, tripping through the floor. The ceiling of my room greeted me, and as gravity reasserted its will on me, I landed on my back amongst the pillows and blankets scattered about my bed. Laying there a moment, I let a groan escape me and dragged my hands down my face, then slapped my cheeks and schooled my features.  
  
In a minute I was wearing my full costume again, with the addition of a pair of sturdy boots, a scarf wrapped around the lower half of my face, and a thick overcoat buttoned up over my jacket. It probably all looked as awkward as it felt to wear, but I’d learned years ago not to take chances with this kind of thing.  
  
Aisha was waiting for me when I reemerged. Her only concession to the weather was an understated techwear jacket that couldn’t have been much more help than my denim jacket and one of the scarves she wore when in costume, draped around her neck. It was a long, large scarf, so it still covered her face up to her mouth, but it being wrapped so loosely all but negated the benefit.  
  
Val, who’d not moved an inch since I left, looked up from the flatscreen to my outfit and started snickering behind a hand.  
  
I flipped her the bird. “Yuk it up, Maskie. We can’t all just make our own clothes.”  
  
“Oh, thank god. I'd hate to see what you'd come up with.”  
  
My other middle finger joined its counterpart before I joined Aisha in the open floor. “Ready, boss?”  
  
She gave me her inadvertent answer by not answering. Her attention was instead on the TV, on which the movie’s protagonist was meeting with the titular monster under a high arch. He was a wiry thing, made up powder-pale, bushy brows and sunken eyes and jagged teeth all amplified, wrapped tight in a long black coat. I found it a little ridiculous that the salesman wasn’t already freaking out, but I could see how into it Val was, and I knew if I pointed it out she’d just call me pedestrian or something, so I kept my mouth shut.  
  
Aisha spoke, addressing Val. “Is this that movie that’s just Dracula but not?”  
  
“Essentially. There’s a few changes here and there but it started out as a blatant unlicensed copy. Most of the changes are only there to dodge copyright, actually.”  
  
“Is it as weirdly zen- xenophobic as the book?”  
  
Val pursed her lips. “Well, at first it might seem worse, actually. It’s much more explicit about the foreigner-plague angle and his, ah, ‘monstrousness’...”  
  
My brows raised. I’d not given it much thought at first, but now that it’d been suggested the parts of him that were exaggerated held new, unpleasant meaning, especially the big aquiline nose.  
  
“...but at the same time there’s no mention of his family history, no spreading of the curse, and no righteous Christian undertones with crosses or holy water.  _T_ _his_  Count is uncharismatic and unseductive, and all he really wants to do is kill people, and then the sun kills him. So in playing him up as a generic evil monster, they ended up neutralizing the more subtle social commentary aspects. Which in this case is a good thing.”  
  
Aisha gave a slow nod, digesting her words. She was a bit odd that way, quick to dismiss the opinion of anyone she didn’t like, but if she respected you in one way or another, she’d almost always listen to what you had to say. It was obvious she trusted her own ability to judge character, to a degree I considered optimistic.  
  
People always found new ways to disappoint, after all.  
  
I tapped her on the shoulder. “Ready?”  
  
She pulled her gaze from the screen. “Yeah, let’s go. Same place we dropped him off.”  
  
I said, “I know,” then paused. “Uh, was it here or on Bet?”  
  
She gave me a pointed look, smirking, and I bristled a little. “Here, dork.”  
  
I shook my head, put a hand to her back, ran us into a wall and tripped.  
  


Θ

  
The thing no one tells you about relocating to a whole new Earth is that it’s  _fucking cold_. As far as anyone could tell, and that included all manner of Thinker tank available, we were the first and only humans on Gimel. That meant no fighting or negotiating with locals but it also meant no greenhouse gases and, as such, lower temperatures all over.  
  
This difference was pronounced in the here and now, trudging through what on Bet had been the New York countryside, struggling against the blankets of snow that the hills and their pines had been tucked in under for the winter. For the second time today I cursed Lissitzky, wished upon him all manner of sharp objects in sensitive places for choosing to hole up here. Not that there were many places around that weren’t cold right now, but membership in the Elite wouldn’t be worth much if they couldn’t even set him up somewhere below the equator, logistics be damned.  
  
It was something of an open secret that he was one of them. He’d been part of the initiative to expand into New York, a daunting task considering they’d been edging in on Legend’s home turf. He’d established himself as a major player in Buffalo around 2012 and, if rumour was to be believed, made as much of an impact on the city’s artistic presence as its criminal elements. Now he was operating some sort of supply business, using his power to pull wood from felled trees, stone from bedrock, metal from ores. A week’s worth of connecting paper trails (which, thankfully, hadn’t been my job) and following transport routes (which  _had_  been my job) led backwards from a number of construction and manufacturing groups to here.  
  
Despite the difficulties, it took mere minutes to reach the hill that was our destination. At its crest stood a cluster of spruces, at one's base sat a small fold-out chair, and in that chair, swimming in an oversized bomber, was a boy with short blond curls. A thermal facemask hooked over his nose covered the lower half of his face. He had a quilt draped neat over his lap and appeared to be playing solitaire atop it by the moonlight that dripped through the branches. He dealt and deployed cards with a brisk rhythm despite the faraway look in his icy blue eyes. All in all, he looked more like an old lady in a nursing home that served espresso than a pseudo-clairvoyant teenager.  
  
He gave no sign of noticing us even as we approached his little stakeout nest, but once we were within a few yards of him he spoke up. “You're early.”  
  
“Good to see you too, Sammy.” Aisha flashed him a grin. She was the only one besides the other Vasil kids that could get away with calling him Sammy. “My day’s been pretty good, thanks for asking.”  
  
“Nothing interesting yet here,” he said. He had yet to look up from his cards, not that he was even focusing on them. “Take a look if you want. He’s spent the last couple hours looking at orders and shaping and measuring wood planks. Four henches loading things into trucks, one guy on chef duty and another doing cleaning. There was another earlier, but he left in one of the trucks an hour ago.”  
  
He grabbed the binoculars that were hanging from one of the chair’s armrests by a strap and handed them to her. She pointed them past the surrounding trees and the hills ahead, pivoting at a steady pace before settling in the direction of a gap between hills. “Bo-ring.” She passed them to me. “We’ll have to come back some other time. Maybe come at it from a different angle if we don’t get anything then either. There's no way he's not running  _some_  kind of shady shit.”  
  
I raised the ‘nocs to my face where they bumped against the lenses of my goggles. Hoping neither of them noticed, I pulled the goggles up to my forehead and tried again. It took me a second to find Lissitzky’s place, but even from this distance it was unmistakable.  
  
According to Aisha, it'd once been a compound under the rule of one of Teacher’s “students.” After the Undersiders had taken him down a peg, it'd been abandoned, failed by dwindling support and cut connections. At some point, Lissitzky, channeling the humble hermit crab, had settled into the shell they'd left behind and made it his own.  
  
In his case that seemed to mean constructing a series of sculptures in, atop and around the existing wooden buildings. Perfect formations of wood and stone in smooth, simple shapes consumed shacks and cabins. Flat rectangular slabs, beams and panels shored up weaknesses, clear in purpose, while more decorative shapes littered their surfaces, arranged in ways both attention-grabbing and arcane. It was like they'd been overtaken by geometric moss, or they were on fire and the fire was prisms and half-spheres and cubes and cones. Panes of flawless glass in either circles or squares, differing from building to building but uniform in each, leaked dim artificial light into the night from three of the buildings. One was probably the cook’s, judging by the stove chimney streaming smoke, and the other was, by process of elimination, being cleaned.  
  
It was impossible to mistake the third building for anything but a manufacturing site. It stood adjacent to what was either a large pond or a small lake, multitudes bigger than any other construction there. It was by far the simplest too, though it still sported architectural oddities here and there. A tall section like a small warehouse made up its bulk. One side opened up to the water, where a number of logs, most stripped of bark, floated, ready to be undone. Another side housed a loading dock, where men in monochromatic uniforms of different reds, greys and beiges carried wood beams into a truck. I couldn't see Lissitzky himself from this angle, but from time to time something extracted a log from the water and brought it inside.  
  
“What’s really shady,” Samuel said, “is that he’s still imitating the original Lissitzky’s Suprematist works, even though the purpose leans more Constructivist. Seems amateurish.”  
  
I suppressed a roll of my eyes. He’d know from the way my vision moved if I did.  
  
I lowered the ‘nocs to see Aisha hold up her hands. “Nope, nuh-uh, stop right there. I’m still on the reading books part- I haven’t even finished the gothy stuff yet. School me in art history later.”  
  
“You didn't answer my question,” Samuel’s gaze lifted from beyond the cards and focused on Aisha, a furrow settling into his brow. “Why are you here early?”  
  
“It wasn't a question, you stated it.”  
  
“It was implied.”  
  
“Something came up,” she said, folding her arms. “Me and the Nocturnes are-”  
  
“‘The Nocturnes and I,’” Samuel corrected.  
  
“ _The Nocturnes and I_ ,” she repeated in a faux-formal tone, poking fun but not mocking, “are gonna meet with Tattletale to talk about helping her out with something, and she wants you in on it too.”  
  
Samuel said, “Oh?” at the same time I said, “What?”  
  
Ignoring me, she continued. “She’ll give us the deets at the meeting. There’ll be some lead-up stuff, mostly in-and-out shit, and then we’ll be in the thick of it. If everything goes smoothly it’ll be the five of us and maybe an add-on or two. Depends on who we can find.”  
  
He considered for a moment, then shrugged. “Beats staying here. Let me pack up my things, I’ll catch up.” He pulled a card box from the backpack hanging from the chair’s back and began gathering up his cards.  
  
“Yeah, alright,” I said before Aisha could answer. “See you at the rocks.” She gave me a look but I just nodded in the direction we’d come to say,  _walk with me_. She didn’t argue the point, but her look became one that I’d come to realize meant,  _I know what you’re about to say and I already have the answer but I’ll let you start anyways_. I wondered for a second if it was something she’d picked up from Tattletale or if she'd developed it on her own.  
  
We followed our footsteps back, punctuating the low whistle of wind through branches with the crush of snow beneath our boots, letting the otherwise total silence hang between us. Only when I was sure we were far enough away to not be heard did I say, “So what the fuck, boss?”  
  
“What the fuck what?” She pulled this doe-eyed, innocent face, one that she might've made work, were she not blatantly teasing me.  
  
“You could've at least warned me we were getting saddled with babysitting duty on this.”  
  
“He's only a year younger than you,” she pointed out, ducking a low branch. “That make you a baby too?”  
  
“I'm only a year under  _you_ , so if it does then all three of us are babies.” A frigid breeze stung at my cheeks and I pulled my scarf up where it'd drooped. “But that's not what I meant. He's got way less experience than the rest of the group.”  
  
She laughed. “He's had his powers longer than any of us!”  
  
“ _Field_  experience. He tagged along when you were after Teacher’s little idiots, and he's done some stakeouts for you since then, but not much more than that. The rest of us have years under our belts. And if this goes long like Tattletale thinks it will he'll be way outta his depth, meaning we'll have to carry him. Babysitting.”  
  
“When your dad was Heartbreaker, home life is a kind of field experience,” she countered. “Plus, if he's gonna need more practice, going in with a bunch of vets he already knows is about as good as it gets. I would know.”  
  
I doubled down. “But why on this? If it gets into something big, I don't think he'd be happy stopping partway through. There's no guarantee he'll work well with the others, either.” I knew he wasn't fond of me, at least.  
  
She waved my concerns aside. “And there's no guarantee he won't, if he gets a fair shake. There's preliminary shit before we're in the thick of it, so if it really doesn't work out he doesn't have to stay on, but this is a perfect chance for him to learn and for you guys to work with active recon for once. And trust me, when shit and fan get busy, having someone who knows what's going on where you can't see will save your ass ten times over.” She stepped clear of a thick root and paused, turning to face me directly. “This isn't just me dumping him on you. I can handle the brats fine, and Sam’s the least of my worries there. This is me saying he could be a good fit long-run, so do me a favor and feel it out, okay? Gimme a little faith.”  
  
As she continued on ahead, I stood there a moment, biting the inside of my cheek, feeling the wet sink into my boots. I stood, and I soaked, and I waited for something I couldn't conceptualize but yearned to feel or know, but nothing came. There was nothing for it. I stepped over the branch and followed.  
  
Another quiet minute’s walk found us at the base of a particular hill where an outcrop had been carved out of the soil and stone. The rock face was wide and smooth, complimented by something of an overhang made of bedrock left unmolested. It looked as though a rectangular swath of earth had simply disappeared, and in a sense it had. This was what Lissitzky’s “mines” often looked like when he was done with them, peeled away for use bit by bit until the space threatens to collapse in on itself.  
  
Samuel caught up to us soon enough. He spared us each a glance as he approached, and it was hard to tell if he'd inferred anything about our conversation with his power.  
  
Fucking Thinkers.  
  
I put a hand on each of their backs. Samuel shivered the slightest bit when I touched him, as he always did, but his face betrayed no emotion.  
  
I ran us into the stone, boots sloshing, and tripped.  
  


Θ

  
Val and Lucas were watching the movie when we exited the Landing Room. Val looked up first. “Oh, hi Sam! If you've come to hear Shannon complain about my choice of movie you're a little late, but I can give you a recap.”  
  
Lucas, who'd changed into his Polar outfit sans bandolier and balaclava, pulled his headphones down around his neck and nodded. “Hey.”  
  
Samuel nodded back to them. “Hi.”  
  
“He's coming with, for the meeting and the missions,” I said, walking to the hallway. “Lemme take off this extra stuff and we'll go right after.”  
  
Val struck up some small talk with Samuel, interspersed with Lucas’ occasional grunt, but I wasn't paying attention. I tromped down the hall and into my room, where I stripped off my scarf, overcoat, and big, soggy boots. Water-resistant my ass.  
  
Rather than head back right away, I let an impulse grab me and drag me to the floor in a trip. Suddenly the air was thin and crisp, and my hands and knees met coarse granite. I rose to my feet to see trees of all kinds sprawl and blend into a sea of wind-rustled green, patchy in places but more beautiful for its faults. I breathed deep, let my lungs fill with familiar air, and let out a groan as loud as I could manage. Far below me, Yosemite groaned back, echoing all the squeezing, pulling feelings I didn't want to name, and for a second I could recognize them a little better, see them from a different angle.  
  
I turned back from my perch atop Half Dome, fell forward to meet its surface, and was slumped on my bedroom floor again, where the air was filtered and the walls said nothing.  
  
When I returned to the living room, the TV was off and Val, Lucas and Samuel were chatting about some other movie I hadn't heard of, casual, amiable.  
  
Aisha looked to me. “You ready?”  
  
I nodded. “Ready.”


	3. Pack 1.3

New Brockton was a boring place, even in the context of a world still being built. Oh, it hustled and bustled, sure; the ports, power plants and factories churned work into resources like beehives, and made as much buzz, too, but that was about all there was to it. Industry had been jam-packed into its hill-bound borders to the point that some intangible sense of liveliness had been pushed right out, squelched beneath the ceaseless need to supply construction efforts here and elsewhere. There were colorful, whimsical murals on the streets and building faces, most complete, depicting stylized flora and fauna mingled with humans in various eye-catching ways, but I’d seen enough cities to know when public art was being used to curtain a thin cultural identity. The longer you looked at it, the more hollow it rang.

The windows of its buildings weren’t golden, though, so that was a plus.

My team hardly ever roamed the streets in costume, so the slight stiffness in my gait and the way my eyes lingered on the faces of the people we passed were understandable, really. I seemed to be the only one such affected - Masquerade, wearing Raven, strode confident and cucumber-cool by my side, a thin, easy grin on his lips, and I didn't have to look over my shoulder to know Polar was too deep in his personal brand of Zen to worry about much of anything. I snuck oblique glances in the reflections of street-level windows to see how Heed was holding up, but he seemed fine as well.

I huffed through my nose. It came out visible but wispy, and the sound was lost on the salty sea breeze and the ambient noise of a city settling down.

In practice, there wasn't much to worry about. Those out and about this time of night were mostly stumbling home from what passed for bars now, and the ones who noticed us weren't quite sure what to do about it except keep their heads down and walk on the other side of the street. In total, we were wearing copious amounts of black, especially with the addition of Heed’s layered techwear and oversized hooded jacket, so we could be pegged as non-heroes with some confidence. On the other hand, we were relative unknowns in villain-controlled territory who weren't causing any visible trouble, so most civilians would be happy to ignore us altogether.

Having a cape that could nudge their attentions away helped too, though I was loath to admit it.

Halfway down a row of sleeping factories I realized I wasn't sure where I was going. I knew I'd been leading us to meet Tattletale, but I didn't know where she was holed up, so why was I leading the group? Another realization followed, and I dug my hands in my jacket’s pockets. There were a few sticky notes there already, crumpled up, but only one folded neatly in half. It read, in chicken scratch pen:

“ _dicktree alley_ ”

Sure enough, a block and a half down there was a gap between a pair of apartment complexes with matching forests painted over their simplistic constructions. A thick-trunked, bushy-leaved tree on one side of the gap had been altered with sloppy lines of black spray paint, creating an image much more explicitly phallic than its base. I snorted. I didn't envy whoever’s job it would be to corral local high school students into cleaning that up. Crumpling up the note, I ducked into the alley and the others followed.

As testament to how long I'd lived with Imp I only jumped a little when she appeared just a few steps ahead of me, walking like she'd never disappeared. “Like I was saying, she’ll want you guys to demonstrate your powers so she can go brain blast on them. Trip, if she’s got a migraine - and boy isn’t that a coin toss these days - don’t fuck with her too much, throwing her balance around. I mean, definitely do fuck with her, just, y’know, once or twice should be fine.”

The alley zigzagged in the middle and we took a moment to peek around the corner, making sure there were no cameras or anything else Heed’s power wouldn't see.

“You'll like her place,” Imp continued. “It's got this casual sorta swank to it. Not as nice as ours, but who's keeping track? Her guards pull double duty tidying up, and her kitchen’s like this encyclopedia of snacks. Not just whatever stuff from before hasn’t gone bad, either. She gets these little bread chip things from that place in Boston no one shuts up about, and-”

I put a hand on her shoulder, stopping her halfway down this stretch of alley. “This wouldn't happen be the place you had me take you last time we ran out of chocolate, would it?”

Her shoulder stiffened. “Shit, I did do that, didn't I?” She relaxed and ‘tsk’ed. “Just keeping you on your toes, soldier. Well done.”

“Hm,” Polar grunted.

“Anyways, now that you’ve passed that test…” She rubbed the area that might be her chin, were mask and cowl not in the way. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. Trip, take me to the hallway just outside her door. Heed, you remember the way from here, right? Take the others round the second back entrance.”

“I could’ve been leading us from the start,” he said, “instead of having you play Carmen Sandiego with her.”

“You’re never too old to play follow the leader, and you’re definitely too young to be making Carmen Sandiego references at me.  _I’m_  too young to make that pull.”

He shrugged. “Nathan liked it.”

“Then you're used to it anyway. See? All works out.” She turned to me. “Quick caveat- keep quiet and stand watch a minute when we get there. Surreptitious-like.”

I nodded, curious, and ran us into a brick wall.

Minimizing the impact of my footfalls without decelerating so slow I ran into the opposite wall was a challenge, but the hallway’s carpeted floors helped. I could hear muffled talking through a closed door so I posted myself a ways down, leaning against the wall. Imp dragged an imaginary zipper over the general area of her mouth and-

I folded my arms. I wasn’t sure why I was here, but that usually meant I should keep doing what I was already doing. Half a conversation drifted in from the open door.

“...could be building a machine that turns dirt into diamonds for all I care. If he can’t, or won’t, honor the terms we have nothing to talk about. It’s more than just the respect, but he’s sure as shit failed in that department too. If he wants his questions answered that bad, I expect both restitution and that he contacts me himself. And that’s at minimum. Toodles.”

A muffled sigh marked the end of the call, followed by a lull. I took a second to shove my hands into my pockets, only to find a bunch of crumpled sticky notes couching a single folded one.

“ _back in a sec. don’t bite my fingers this time_ ”

The talking started up again. I crumpled the note.

“No memo today, no, this is in lieu of that. His lieutenants were scattering disinfo down the ranks to feel for a mole. They found one, just not ours… Everything we were sure about is still solid, but there’s a fifth power in the mix they’ve been trying to keep a lid on. Low rating Shaker. Green has the details… Exactly. If it waxes and wanes, if it shorts out when a squirrel’s nearby, if the lights flicker whenever one of them takes a piss, I want to know.”

The gentle clicks of a keyboard filled the next moments. I did my best to prep myself, keep my lips shut tight to prevent even a small gasp, but when Aisha reappeared with her hand over my mouth I still tried to suck in air around her glove. Primal instinct shouted at me to chomp at the obstruction, but I quashed the notion. A proud moment indeed.

Aisha pulled her hand away and when I got a good look at what she’d made me wait for I regretted not biting her. In her arm was a stack of resealable cookie packages, which couldn’t have been worth less than three hundred dollars in total. A few simple, sealed paper bags stamped with the logo of a store in Boston garnished her spoils. She put her fingers and thumb up to the corner of her mask’s mouth, dragged them up to her ear and moved them back again, signing “home.”

To avoid risking the sound of footsteps, we fell to the floor. Aisha had to wrap both arms around her ill-gotten goodies to not lose them all in the trip, and even then I wasn’t sure she’d made it without dropping anything. It was an impressive stack.

While she was putting everything away in our pantry, I said, “You could’ve warned me you were gonna try and get me in trouble with my boss’ boss before I even meet her.”

“Don’t worry, if you’re working for me, she’ll be expecting something like this already.” A couple chocolate chip sacrifices disappeared from the last package before she put it away. She pulled her scarf down and her mask up and crammed them in her mouth. “B’shidesh, ‘ou won’ gonbwain bout havin’ googiesh hew.” Pause, swallow. “Even if they're a bit stale. Or the pita chips. I'm telling you, those shits are delectable.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that.

Nudging her mask the rest of the way up, she pulled out her phone. “How long do you give ‘em?”

“The cookies or the rest of our group?”

“The group.”

“The place is off Orchard, right? And the alley opened onto Chestnut... Two minutes, at most.”

“Twenty on it?”

“If we’re betting then it’s three or less.”

“Wishy washy. Deal.” She started a timer on her phone and placed it on the kitchen counter.

In the meantime, she popped one of the pita chip bags open and pulled a container of some creamy tomato dip from the fridge. She invited me to join - “C’mon, make like a rich old lady at a dinner party with me.” - and I caved. The combination ended up being pretty good, at least as far as street-available stuff went. The timer beeped, we fridged the dip and clipped the chips, and then we were off.

When Aisha saw there were no snack packages lying abandoned in the hallway she gave a silent, emphatic fist pump. I made sure my hair was properly tousled before we entered. The product had all but worn off by then but I managed something I hoped was presentable.

The sound of typing was softer now, less clicking than tapping and coming from deeper within. We passed a kitchen area - where I detoured to the trash and emptied my pockets - and a space set aside for a powered-down computer rig with more monitors than I thought anyone could ever need. Aisha stopped me before we reached the room the tapping was coming from and held a finger to her lips, but before she could fade into forgotten-ness a woman's voice called.

“I know you're here, Imp. Try to startle me and I'll send texts to the Heartbroken telling them you agreed to take them all dirtbag hunting. Individually. On the same day.”

Aisha burst through the doorway. “You wouldn't- aw, fuck.”

I entered after her. The meeting room was spacious, bigger than our living room. It boasted a smooth, polished table, a short couch that somehow fit between table and wall, and a number of comfortable-looking leather chairs. The carpet was spotless, save for, well, a few spots: wine stains, I recognized, dark, faded by time but not by any attempts to remove them. Seated next to one, at the head of the table, filling out a purple-on-black bodysuit instead of the black-on-lavender number I'd last seen her in, was Tattletale. She hadn't looked up from her laptop, which she was still typing on with one hand, but her other was raised in our direction, holding up a little paper bag of pita chips.

Aisha groaned. “I knew four bags was too greedy.”

“Lucky for you I'm such a generous hostess I won't even charge you for the cookies.” With a complicated series of key taps the laptop shut down. She closed it, set it and the chips on the table and smiled at us. She had the eyes of someone well practiced in maintaining composure after a long day. They glinted, but they did not  _shine_. “And you,” she said, looking to me, “are Trip, leader of the Nocturnes, long-range teleporter, and co-conspirator in the food heist. Don't worry, I know Imp put you up to it.” Her smile curled, the glint twinkled. “I'll only hold it against you a little.”

Her opening salvo caught me unprepared, but I managed to return with, “And you're Tattletale. Undersider, Thinker, and, uh… catsuit enthusiast.”

That at least garnered a chuckle from her.

Aisha pulled her mask all the way off. “Quit the Imp talk, I live with these dorks.”

“Alright. I know  _Aisha_  put you up to it.”

“And  _Aisha_  isn't as generous, so pay up.” She held out an expectant hand, beckoning for effect.

“Take it out of my next stipend,” I groused. “Or just wait until I win the next bet and we'll be even.”

Aisha laughed. “You're not gonna. You're a Mover. You don't know how long it takes us slowpokes to get anywhere anymore.” She cocked her head. “North warehouses to the Towers, on foot.”

I tried to overestimate to a severe degree. “Twenty minutes.”

She laughed harder and left the room.

“Take a seat anywhere but here, there, and there,” Tattletale said. “If you'd like something to drink don't hesitate to ask Aisha. She can get it for you, seeing as she knows my kitchen so well.”

I took a chair a couple seats away from her. The leather was as comfortable as it looked. I was going to decline but instead I asked, “Actually, you- er, you wouldn't happen to have any Nevadas, would you? The iced teas in the tall cans? I've been looking for more of those for forever.”

“Those were a west coast thing, right?” I nodded. “Probably not, then. I have other iced teas aplenty, though. You'll just have to make do with the slop we drank over here.”

I tried not to let my disappointment show. “Oh. Ah, well. Whatevs.” The chair swiveled like a greased Lazy Susan and I called out, “Boss-servant! One inferior tea, please!”

“Get it yourself, Mover,” Aisha retorted from the kitchen. “Should only take, what, two, three seconds?” Despite this, she returned with three bottles: water, iced mocha, and lemon tea. She distributed them and plopped down next to one of the stains.

Tattletale sipped her water and winked at me. “Don't worry about getting grilled just yet. I'll wait for the others. Relax.”

“I'm fine, I'm chill,” I said, keeping my expression flat and my shoulders loose. Wouldn't want her to see some chance, meaningless smidgen of tension and get the wrong idea, after all. I tried the bottled tea. It wasn't as good.

She turned to Aisha. “I know it's not as important as raiding my cupboards but I would like to see that incident report at some point.”

“What's it worth to ya?”

“Worth saving the effort of texting the kids.”

“I want at least a little something outta this.”

“Fine. Here.”

“Score.” Aisha unzipped her jacket, pulled the file from an inner pocket and traded it for the bag of pita chips, which she popped open and started munching through right away.

For a minute or two no one spoke. Tattletale dove into the details of the report, Aisha dove into her snack, and I twiddled my thumbs. Literally- at one point I got so bored I tried to play thumb-war against myself under the table. The logistics were bunglesome at best.

Eventually, in a stroke of chance that was hard to distinguish as boon or bane, a knock interrupted what was threatening to become an awkward silence of legendary proportions.

“That must be them,” Tattletale said, closing the file. “Aisha?”

Aisha scoffed. “If you can't delegate menial tasks to your team, what's the point of having one?”

I rolled my eyes, swiveled to the side and fell out of my seat, reappearing by the door. I opened it.

“Lovely place you have, Tattletale,” Masquerade said, arching his fine brows at me. “My, you're a bit more butch than I was expecting.”

I stepped aside to let him, Polar and Heed in. “Anyone ever tell you how funny you are? Because you're so funny. Just a riot.”

“Only most people,” he said, pantomiming despondence. “I am tragically underappreciated in my time.”

Once everyone was seated in the meeting room, with my team next to me and Heed next to Aisha, Tattletale leaned back in her chair, rested her feet on the edge of the table and began. “Alright: introductions. I'm Tattletale. You know who I am. Under the mask I'm Lisa Wilborne. I'd show you but it's tedious to put it back on and I've got plans to get to after this. One of you I know, one I've met, and the other two I've only heard about. Samuel, glad you're down to play with the big kids. Settled on a name yet?”

“Went with Heed.”

“Good choice.”

“Seems a little early to be throwing out civilian names,” I said.

“A show of good faith to kick things off on a good note. And one that invites reciprocation.”

“I don't imagine you get much use out of that name anyways,” Masquerade remarked.

“Interesting that you're the one to point that out, but we'll get to you. Let's start with Mr. Strong-and-Silent.”

Polar tugged his balaclava off, leaving his beard to slowly decompress back to size. “Lucas Amsel. Polar in costume.”

“Twenty. Summer birthday. You work out enough to keep in shape, do more endurance runs than sprints. Record collector. You listen to… rock, metal? No, electronic. Ambient. And folk, huh? Singer-songwriters. You had military training at some point.” Her eyes narrowed a fraction. “JROTC. Then PRT-ROTC. Were you part of the PRTCJ after?”

He nodded.

“How'd that lead you to here?”

“Shaker named Skyscrape killed my friend. Got powers. Being a cape in the ‘Ceej would've been more trouble than it was worth so I went after Skyscrape instead.”

Aisha chimed in. “Turned out the dickweed was working for Teacher. I was sabotaging his shit with Sammy and Flor when we found him snooping around too. Double-teamed the douche, kept in contact, called him up when I was putting together another team.”

“She pays well and knows how to put a group to use,” he said. “I wasn’t in the ‘Ceej for moral high-ground. I make a living? We don’t hit folks that can’t take it or don’t deserve it?” He shrugged. “Works for me.”

“Your power?” Tattletale asked

Lucas retrieved some ball bearings from his pocket, held one in his left hand and another in his right and charged them. The one in his left flew to the other and he held the joined two in his right. He took a third bearing, held it over one of the two and let go. It jumped away from one and attached itself to the other. “I charge things. Give them a positive or negative charge. They work like magnets.”

“Except not by magnetism,” Tattletale added. “The force changes depending on the relative and total masses. Manton-limited, and there’s a cap on affectable mass, but still pretty versatile.” She shifted her sights onto Masquerade. “He was a more recent trigger so most of what I knew already was from Aisha. You, I remember being talked about in conjunction with her-” she tipped her head my way “-but only near the end.”

He met her smile with his own. “Masquerade. I’d take off my mask but I’m a Changer, so it’s a bit of a moot point. Val, otherwise.”

“Just Val?”

“Just Val.”

“You can get comfortable if you like, Just Val. No need for a business form here.”

“Mm. And who says this is my business form?”

She waved him off. “You got me. I just wanted to see what your other primary form looked like.”

“Ah,” he said, leaning back in his chair, “of course.” His Raven form dissolved into ash, from which Crow emerged, maskless. She struck a faux-demure pose, her body language becoming loose and languid. “Stunning, I know. It’s alright if you’ve no words.”

Tattletale smiled, and it was a warm thing now, like a bit of sun filtering through clouds before it was gone again. “Only a few. Late teens. Nineteen? Eighteen. Inactive lifestyle before you got your powers. Good with plants but a terrible cook. You never did any theatre-” Wait, what? “-but you’ve sure watched a lot of movies. You’re miffed I called you out on your cooking but you’ll get over it.”

I watched Val for any reaction to Tattletale’s claim but she only gave a conceding nod. My power numbed me to the sensation of shifts in gravity, but I imagined my conceptualization of Val being turned on its ear was a decent approximation. She acted like every theatre kid I'd known in high school shoved in a blender and drizzled from a jeweled goblet over a stage on Broadway. She'd  _told me_  she'd been acting for so long it was like breathing. Now I didn't know what to think.

“Tell me about your power. The Changer part is obvious, but there's a Striker/Stranger aspect too, isn't there?”

“You've caught me.” Val held up her hands and shifted into the appearance of a minor celebrity from before, complete with red carpet dress. “I can copy anyone I make skin-to-skin contact with long enough.” She shifted back to Crow. “It's the quickest way for me to get a new form; making one from scratch takes hours. Most of my forms used someone else as a base. Heavily modified, of course, though there might be minor details left over here and there.”

Tattletale scanned her looks, barely staying this side of polite. Val didn’t seem to mind. “And the clothes?”

“Similar to the bodies. More complicated pieces take more time. It will create anything I can justify as part of an outfit or costume but anything that leaves my person disintegrates.”

“Aw. No free wardrobe, then?”

“Afraid not.”

“And here I thought I'd just won the lottery.” Tattletale breathed a small sigh. “Before the disappointment overwhelms me, let's get to you, Trip.” Her eyes honed in on me like laser sights. “You used to taxi people to Endbringer fights, a couple at a time. You did that for most of them, too, and started doing search-and-rescue for the last handful.”

“Yeah.” I hesitated for a split second, then pulled my goggles down so they hung from my neck. “Shannon. Uh, Mills. White-ass name for a Mexican girl, I know,” I said, pre-empting her Thinkering the info out of me. “I was adopted.”

Her gaze bore down on me like a swelling, smiling ocean tide. I wondered how the others hadn't flinched when I was only barely holding it back myself. “Sixteen. Seventeen in a month. An honest-to-god Cali girl, down to the longboarding and smoking weed.”

“ _Used_  to! I  _used_  to longboard. I learned the error of my ways and went back to skateboards in, like, a month. If that.”

Her lips took on a snarky tilt but she continued. “You know a lot about wine for someone who doesn't drink. You were put in self-defense classes young, enough that even though you started caping when you were… fourteen? Barely fourteen, you were confident enough to start picking fights with local Wards right away. You did your actual crimes anywhere but the bay, helped with the important stuff, and gave the Wards some practice, so the PRT and Protectorate weren't in any hurry to catch you. Your power makes you exceptionally slippery and you kept your nose out of Elite holdings, so they weren't making many moves to subsume you either.”

I folded my arms. “You didn't go this deep with the others.”

“You've been caping longest. More for me to work with.”

“I guess.”

“Your power, I already know about. I still want to get a demonstration but that can wait until we're done here.” Tattletale took her feet off the table, deigning to sit like the rest of us for a minute.

I shot a questioning look Aisha’s way, but she just shrugged.

“What I'm calling you in for could be simple. Just some Tinker with a broad specialization and fucked allegiances. Maybe a cold-case corpse theft to their name, too. But if it's what I think it is?” She leaned forward. “It could be - or become - catastrophic, on as much as a citywide level. More if left unchecked.”

There was a pause around the table. Aisha whistled low. “Well, isn't that a sick sort of nostalgic.”

To my surprise, Samuel said what I was thinking. He hadn't yet removed his hood and facemask. “You still haven't given us any details about this.”

“What we're looking at is a sect of Fallen that dropped contact with the main families in 2012. After the Morning, they scurried back to Bet Kansas and seized what was left of Wichita, where they’d been based in the first place. According to what little intel can be gathered about them, they’re thriving by hoarding absurd amounts of tinkertech and have cut themselves off from everyone except a couple key suppliers, one of which I know for certain.

“They have one of Postman’s ‘boxes,’ which means the Elite are involved. My guess is they’re trading parts for whatever spare tinkertech their own Tinkers can maintain. Lissitzky is the best fit for supplying the simpler components in large quantities, which is why I asked Aisha to start looking into his operation. The first move we’d make would be there, when Postman’s convoy shows up next.”

“What’s so dangerous about that mystery Tinker, though?” I asked. “Does it tie in with the whole bodysnatcher thing?”

Tattletale held up a hand. “I’m asking you to trust I have a damn good reason for not going into that just yet. I’ll explain everything when we know enough to go after them, but any sooner than that and I could be putting you all, myself, and this whole op in serious jeopardy. If you want out even that far in, I won’t stop any of you.”

“You’ve got me curious now, Tats,” Aisha said. “What pointed you at this to begin with?”

Her smile didn’t move, but the glint was gone. “Something Bonesaw said, during Gold Morning. I don’t think she realized I heard it, or that she even said it out loud at all.”

After a beat, Aisha shook her head slowly. “Shi-i-it. I don’t know if I  _wanna_  know what the end of the world made  _her_  think about.”

“Like I said, you’ll all have a chance to back out once you do know. All that said, and knowing you’ll each receive considerable financial compensation,” and here she swept her gaze across the room, meeting each of ours in turn. “Are you in?”

“Still sounds like a raw deal,” Aisha said, grinning. “‘Course I’m in.”

Samuel nodded.

“In,” Lucas said.

“Might as well,” Val said.

All eyes fell on me. This whole thing was starting to sound beyond my pedigree, and I could feel the itch to say no sink its teeth into my nape, base fear of the unknown in its venom, but I shrugged it away. “Got nothing better to do. I’m in.”

Tattletale nodded like it'd been a foregone conclusion. “I'll have more details about Postman’s convoy in a day or two and I'll send the plan’s specifics down the wire when it's finalized. For now, keep watching Lissitzky’s compound, familiarize yourselves with the layout. Good meeting you, Nocturnes, and I'll see you all when it's go time. Trip?”

I'd just pulled my goggles back up. “Yeah?”

“Mind giving that demonstration now?”

Oh, right. I glanced at my team and Samuel, who were already filing out of the room, and at Aisha, who was giving Tattletale a look I couldn't place, one that felt foreign on her features. “Where do you wanna go?”

Her eyes almost shone. “Take me sightseeing.”


End file.
